ABSTRACT
The common use of memory provides a link between these two stages of thinking truth; the secularization of speech marks a break between a mythic and a rationalist semantic field in which the term Altheia persists. Altheia is caught up in a relationship of ambiguity with Lth because, for example, the poet who speaks truth by using memory also confers truth's other, forget fulness, on his listeners. The veiled citizen woman, who conceals her true nature with cosmetics and drapery, remains an other, full of potential truth, uncannily resembling the slave, male and female, who awaits torture, who conceals truth. If torture helped to manage the troublesome differentiation between slaves and free in the ancient city, it also served as a redundant practice reinforcing the dominant notion of the Greeks that truth was an inaccessible, buried secret. Marcel Detienne describes a historical shift in the Greeks ideas about truth that corresponds to the historical shift from mythic to rational thought.
